Nissan’s production line in Washington, Tyne and Wear. ‘The Japanese ambassador make it absolutely clear that access to the single market is the reason Japanese businesses are here.’
Photograph: Christopher Thomond

The morning after the Brexit referendum I was in Grainger Market, Newcastle upon Tyne’s 19th-century covered market, which is both a tribute to our industrial history and a legacy of it. A woman stopped me, clearly flustered.

“Oh,” she said, “I wish I’d seen you yesterday. I didn’t know which way to vote.”

“Sorry,” I replied, “I was out door-knocking. How did you vote?”

“Leave. But I never thought leave would win. What’s going to happen now?”

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I often think of that woman. The question “What’s going to happen now?” has been rattling around Whitehall and the country for the last 20 months, and was partially answered this week with the leak of Brexit economic analyses. They showed that Theresa May’s Brexit “strategy” will hit our region hardest. If, and right now it looks like a very big if, the government gets the deal it wants, the north-east’s growth could take a 11% hit. If they walk away without a deal – and that’s what the Conservative hard right seem to both want and expect – then our GDP drops by 16%. Every region is worse off, but we are the worst off.

To put that into context, the north-east already has some of the UK’s highest levels of deprivation. My constituency has the eighth highest unemployment rate. In some wards, half the children are growing up in poverty.

So the answer to what happens next would appear to be: we get poorer. And in the north-east, we get poorer faster.

Making it harder for us to access the world’s largest free trade market just does not make sense

Is that what the north-east voted for?

Brexit was always going to hold risks for us. We are the only UK region to export more than we import, and more than half of that goes to other parts of the EU, including hundreds of thousands of the cars that roll off the Nissan production lines in Sunderland. Around 160,000 jobs in the north-east are directly linked to our membership of the single market, while our region’s universities received £155m from the EU in the current funding cycle alone.

Among the many things that make me angry are the commentators who blame Brexit on the northern working class, those “left behind” by globalisation. It’s especially ironic, given that the “Brexit revolution” was led by a Surrey stockbroker and an Old Etonian.

But I do think Brexit was driven in part by a neoliberal economic model that did not work for the council estate in which I grew up. It’s a model that left north-eastern workers almost £4,000 a year poorer than they were 10 years ago, where the industries we took such pride in have all but disappeared, and entry to the industries of the future is nigh-on impossible if you don’t have the right qualifications, “social capital” or the funds to work for free for six months. For those with happy memories of the full employment, job security and relative social certainty of the 70s, why wouldn’t you want to “take back control”?

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But these impact assessments show that whoever does end up in control of the post-Brexit economy, it won’t be the north-east. Indeed without the cushion of EU funding or the potential economic engine of meaningful devolution, we are likely to be more vulnerable than ever to the neglect of Whitehall and dependency on a relatively small number of large employers.

The north-east voted for Brexit, and by a significant majority: 58% to 42%. I – and my party – respect the result of the referendum. But the north-east did not vote for this Brexit. Nobody here voted for their children to be poorer. Like the vast majority of my colleagues, I did not come into politics to make the people I represent more likely to be unemployed.

Labour has been clear for some time that maintaining the benefits of the single market and customs union is a necessary part of securing a Brexit that works for working people.

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As shadow minister for industrial strategy, I am developing policies that will help bring smart, sustainable and inclusive growth to the country; that will deliver the skills, investment and opportunities to make us competitive in markets across the globe. Making it harder for us to access the world’s largest free-trade market just does not make sense.

We have recently seen British businesses write to a Conservative government to beg for some scrap of clarity, the Japanese ambassador make it absolutely clear that access to the single market is the reason Japanese businesses are here, and now proof that the Tory Brexit will make the poorest poorer and increase regional economic disparity.

It’s time for Theresa May to put people’s jobs before her bickering, privileged, ideologically constipated, self-obsessed backbenchers. Or get out of the way for a government that will.